


Breathe

by littleghost91



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: Coffee Shop Cute, Comfort, F/F, Falling In Love, First Dates, First Kiss, Fluff, Reader-Insert, Reuploaded with permission of original author, This is very soft and gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:01:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28440579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleghost91/pseuds/littleghost91
Summary: You hold your breath as you find your way to a strange little coffee shop at a strange moment of your life, and you rediscover how to breathe in the company of the strange woman you meet there.
Relationships: Jillian Holtzmann/You
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This work is a reupload. The fic has been returned to the archive with the permission of an author who is no longer active in the fandom.

You don’t realize, at first, just how long you’ve been holding your breath.

By the time you relocate to Greenwich Village in New York City, you’ve spent what feels like an entire lifetime and then some in small towns full of small minds - cities and spaces and places where survival has meant reshaping yourself again and again to fit inside impossible boxes. After close to three decades of settling for less than you know you deserve, you decide the day you graduate from your PhD program that you’re simultaneously too old to languish away in uninspiring places with ambitionless people, and too young not to chase creation in the color and chaos of a city where you can become someone.

With your degree in hand, you close the chapter on the life you’ve led up to that point, and you snap the last tie to bind you to a suffocating midwestern existence. You push through the pictures and the parties with your family and friends to celebrate your achievement, but you’ve already made up your mind before the ceremonies are over. You apply for positions on each coast where you can continue your research in states which don’t force you to fight for your basic human rights, with LGBTQ communities bigger than the same fifty faces you’re all-too familiar with whether you want to be or not.

You’re accepted to a flexible role in New York within three months, you figure out your living situation within three weeks, and you’re on a plane within three days. You don’t look back out the window at the world you leave behind - at the home which no longer feels like home and hasn’t for some time.

Maybe it’s cliché to run off to the gayest neighborhood in the United States to find yourself, but you’re burnt out and stressed out and you’ve lost the ability to care, if you ever had one at all.

The city doesn’t feel like home, at first, either.

It’s big, for one. Bigger than you were expecting. And fast-paced. You could do all the research in the world, and understand, theoretically, what moving to a city of eight-and-a-half million people will entail, and it would still never be enough when the sheer, unflinching magnitude of the place stares you in the face.

It’s also unfamiliar. It reminds you of the hand-me-down clothes your mom used to make you wear as a child: you try it on and tell yourself you’ll grow into it; it’ll suit you just fine once you’ve worn it a couple of times - but as you look in the mirror right now in this moment, all you can see is another box which doesn’t fit you.

And might not ever.

You hold your doubts at arms-length, but they creep in anyway.

You pace and fret and bite your lip in the privacy of your apartment. You don’t know what you’ll do if you come all this way only to discover you’re the reason you can’t feel at home anywhere. Fear lingers behind your ear and whispers, from time to time, that it’s not your hometown, it’s not your new home - it’s just you, and you’re not capable of comfort in your own skin.

“Lost” has, after all, been part of your factory default programming for as far back as you can remember.

You shake your head and toss the thoughts with the motion. Defeatist attitudes like that are exactly what ensnare brilliant minds within the soul-sucking small towns you couldn’t get out of fast enough, and you’re determined not to be one of those people lost to the crush of monotonous mediocrity. You’re inventive. You’re resourceful. There are infinite possibilities at your fingertips, you remind yourself - but you can only grasp them with action.

If New York City doesn’t feel like home yet, you’ll just have to walk the streets until they’re yours.

So you do. You roam without direction or destination and you revel in the freedom of it. You trace the steps of those who came before you, and you let the pulse of their memory guide you down Christopher Street, up to the Stonewall Inn, past battle-scarred book stores and bakeries you’re sure would have fascinating stories to share if they could speak. You get lost, intentionally, and it becomes a game to find your way back to your apartment once you are. You take in the sights and the sounds you may have otherwise overlooked, and you start to feel better about the state of where you are.

One day, your wanderlust lands you at the door of Bricks and Beans Café, a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop you would have missed if you blinked.

The name alone would have been enough to entice you inside, but the rainbow flag in the window and the Black Power fist painted on the glass seal the deal in no uncertain terms. On the other side of the door, a sign announcing coffee makes you gay in big block letters welcomes you across the threshold and into a cozy maze of paint-splattered tabletops bearing mismatched coffee mugs in every hue.

You approach the counter and the tall, red-headed, septuagenarian femme who stands behind it. A smattering of colorful buttons pop and spark against her dark apron, one of which says Noelle in a flowery cursive script. Her face lights up with warmth when she remarks she’s not seen you around before. She correctly surmises this must be your first time at the café and you must be new to the Village.

You note, pointedly, how she doesn’t say “lost.”

Noelle calls out to another barista to take over for her before she leads you over to a table in the corner, setting a water and a coffee in front of you, which you accept with a grateful smile. When she asks you about your story, and what brought you to the city, you tell her - and although she’s a total stranger, she has a way of making you feel like you’ve known her your entire life.

She learns you’re a social scientist and a researcher who has come to the city to be empowered by the historic red brick buildings of the Village and the remnants of revolutions past, in the footsteps of the forebears who paved the way for you to live your best, bravest, and boldest life.

You learn she’s the owner of the café, a Stonewall veteran who threw one of many bricks alongside Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and all of the others who were present for the explosive birth of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. She shows you the scar she received during an altercation with the police that night almost fifty years ago, and as you can’t help but be swept away in her animated retelling of events, she offers to instruct you in the art of molotov cocktails if that’s something which should ever interest you.

You politely decline.

But you come back the next day, and the one after that, until you find you’re coming into the strange little coffee shop most days, and you find it’s quickly becoming one of the highlights of your week. Noelle lets you post up in the corner and work on your research, and although you initially feel guilty over spending so much time in her space while buying little, she encourages you to hang out, drink your water, and relax in a space where you don’t have to be anything but exactly who you are. To soothe any further anxieties you may have, she asks you every day when you leave if she’ll see you around tomorrow, and you can never say no to her.

You smile and nod.

You keep your promise.

And Noelle is always happy to see you.

You leave her tips as often as you can, and you feel a bit better when you notice you’re by far not the only person she has this kind of arrangement with. Noelle’s café is popular with people on the outskirts of respectable society by intention as well as through no fault of their own, a purposeful point of pride for the feisty femme who’s spent her lifetime fighting for justice. She welcomes local homeless individuals with open arms and an open heart, and when you look, you notice the woman she lets sleep in a quiet, tucked-away booth in the adjacent dining room. She invites members of the LGBTQ community from all walks of life into the wedge of the world she’s carved out to celebrate them, and when you look, you see the sixteen or seventeen-year-old trans girl who spends her days making watercolors as Cora before she has to step back into her life in the closet outside the café. Noelle knows all of her regulars by name, including you, and it seems to bring her genuine joy to be able to offer much more than coffee within her walls.

Even as the café becomes a fixture of your new life in New York, you can’t help but wonder sometimes if this place is actually real. No matter how much time you spend there, it never stops feeling like the kind of establishment which would flicker in and out of this dimension from the Twilight Zone, and only exist when one looks directly at it. It’s the place around the bend where, for the people who have climbed on a world which goes by too fast, they can jump off into sunlight and serenity. It’s the door at the bottom of a swimming pool that leads to a secret place, because a collective need for love and acceptance has turned fantasy into reality. It’s a liminal space, a transitional space, a crossing-over space for people on the verge of becoming anew.

Whatever it is, you relearn how to breathe in all of its eclectic eccentricity, because it’s home, and so are you.


	2. Chapter 2

You hold your breath the first time you notice one of Noelle’s other regulars in particular, because the absolute enigma who breezes through the doors of the café day after day and leaves a storm of stars in her wake steals the air right out of your lungs. 

Like clockwork, she comes in every day around noon and leaves with an abundance of drinks - anywhere from one to five, though you wouldn’t be surprised if they’re all for her. She buzzes with exuberance that spills out of her like sunlight, excitement electrifying the ends of her hair and discovering its point of least resistance in her fingers, which are always moving. No one - least of all any of the employees - blinks when she strolls in with soot stains on her overalls, or toting, in the way that some women wear babies, devices which look frighteningly like portable nuclear reactors. 

You sure do, though. 

You blink and you gawk and you marvel from the privacy of your table in the corner as this tiny whirlwind of color and chaos makes the world around her stop for ten to fifteen minutes each day. You listen as she gleefully gives updates about her “babies” to Noelle at the counter, and you gather, after some initial confusion and panic, that she’s never actually referring to human children. She oscillates wildly between referring to her pet chinchillas and her inventions as such, and truth be told, you have no idea what to make of her when she does. The mystery woman is always quick to string together detailed explanations of her latest projects with words that seem like they _could_ make sense - _if_ the kinds of creations she speaks to were remotely possible according to the laws of physics. Which they aren’t. 

Like most of Noelle’s favorites - the kind of people who would be drawn to an elderly femme offering molotov lessons with one’s macchiato - she’s wiry and wild, and she carries herself with an air of unapologetic authenticity, transforming the space by virtue of inhabiting it. 

She seems like the kind of person who could get lit off of ten shots of espresso and keep on rolling, is what you’re saying. 

Most days, you can handle her light at its brightest and most brilliant, even as the sight of her proves enough to shake your foundation, knock you off of your rhythm, and never fail to send your heart directly into your throat. This isn’t your first rodeo; you’ve been attracted to gorgeous girls before, and you’ll move on from your little crush with time and concentrated effort to do so. You rationalize it’s for the better that you don’t get immediately mixed up with another person in the quest you’ve undertaken to find yourself in a new city. After all, you did uproot your life more than 600 miles to the east partly as a means to escape the overly entangled, overly enmeshed, small-town Lesbian Drama of your past. 

This is _your_ moment to shine as the star of your own life, and you’re not sure you’re willing to share the spotlight with anyone else just yet. You have a plan for the next stage of your life in New York City, and it involves doing important research, running boldly and breathlessly toward the most ambitious and prosperous version of yourself you’re capable of being here, and walking in the legacy of the legendary LGBTQ minds who came before you on these very streets, not necessarily in that order. Neither this woman, nor any woman, could possibly be glittering enough to entice you away from your path.

Not even one whose impossibly blue eyes light up like a reactor core whenever she talks about breathing life into theories which by all accounts should be impossible. 

Stop it, you tell yourself. 

You steel your resolve and you resolve she can’t take it from you. Case closed. 

However, _most days_ are not _the one day_ she rolls up to the counter - in uncomfortably direct line of sight from your slice of serenity in the corner of the café - wearing a pristine green crop top underneath those same grease and oil-splattered overalls you rarely see her without some version of, exposing a small triangle of smooth skin on either side. 

You feel validated in holding your breath when you first saw her, because your foresight was correct - once you give her the last one you have left, you can’t draw another. She takes it with her in her stride, pocketing it alongside your dignity when all you can do is gape. She greets Noelle with a familiar, vivacious cry, and Noelle returns her joy. 

“Hey, baby!” she says. “Who all are you picking up for today?” 

“I’m here for a Boring Cappuccino for Erin,” the mystery woman responds, punctuating the emphasis she places on the words _boring cappuccino_. “And my usual, for me. Iced mocha latte with extra chocolate, please.” 

“You and your cup of sugar, Holtzy. I’m always telling you it’s a ‘mocha’ or a ‘latte,’ not both,” Noelle teases. She reaches first for a paper cup - Erin’s boring cappuccino, you suppose - then for a plastic cup. She draws a small radiation symbol on the front in place of a name. You note that she doesn’t note the order on either one as she passes the cups to the next barista down the line. “A mocha is already a latte, with chocolate.” 

The blonde leans on the counter, her chin in her hands as she makes a disbelieving sound that draws a laugh out of the owner of the café. She contemplates this information for a moment or two, rolling her head back and forth to accentuate the act of thinking, before she flashes a bright, toothy grin which suggests she was never really considering the point at all. 

“Nah,” she says, resolutely. “I don’t buy it.” 

“It remains true whether or not you believe it,” Noelle gives back with a chuckle. “I would think the person who hunts ghosts for a living would get that.” 

You do a double-take, because you could not have possibly heard that statement correctly.

“Pssshh.” She waves Noelle off with a dismissive hand gesture. The second barista sets her two drinks on the bar, and she pulls a bill out of her front pocket where your dignity went. Folding it over, she holds it like a cigarette and waggles it back and forth. “So, what’s the damage today?” 

Noelle gently pushes her hand away with a roll of her eyes and an affectionate smile. “It’s my treat today, Holtzy, but you’re lucky I like you,” she says. “Tell Erin I said hi, and I hope she’ll come in again soon.” 

“Thanks Noelllle,” she sings. A frustrating warmth floods your face as you’re stuck by the way her voice is silly and unmistakably sapphic, ranging with no apparent rhyme or reason from a low, sultry, serious timbre to the chirpy singsong tone she can slide into so naturally as it suits her to do so. “You’re the best. See you tomorrow.” 

She collects her cups in her hands, and though she only has two, she insists on stacking them one on top of the other and carrying them out that way. She casually sips from the one on top while not raising her free hand to support it. You wait and wait for her to stumble and spill them everywhere, but she doesn’t. You have no idea how she manages to avoid such an outcome day after day given the lengths she goes to not to use more than one hand to hold upwards of five drinks. 

You must be looking at her a little too pointedly, you realize, because you catch her eye as she exits. She pauses to look you up and down, and you squirm under the scrutiny of her gaze, kicking yourself for checking her out so blatantly. You can’t read her expression, so you offer a small smile and a wave which you hope are enough to obscure that your pulse is racing out of your veins. This seems to be the right move: she winks and gives you a two-fingered salute in response, and then she’s gone as quickly as she’s come. 

It flusters you more than it should, and enough that you decide you have to know who this mystery woman is, despite the fact the question alone should fly in the face of your better judgement. You approach Noelle after the door closes behind her - separating you once more from the world she sets aflame around her - to ask. 

“Oh, that’s Jillian Holtzmann,” she tells you. “She’s one of my favorites, reminds me a lot of me when I was her age. She works at Hook and Ladder 8 down the street.” 

“The what?” 

“The firehouse,” Noelle clarifies, with a laugh. “Sorry, baby, I forget you’re new around here.” 

Your brows knit together as you mull this information over in light of the woman you’ve seen; something doesn’t line up, and you have the feeling there’s something Noelle isn’t telling you. “She doesn’t look like a firefighter,” you say. 

“She isn’t. She’s a nuclear engineer. And one of the women who just last year looked the end of the world in the eyes and averted the apocalypse.” 

“The - the _what_?!” 

Noelle holds up her hands like she’s said too much already. Mischief sparkles behind her eyes as you sputter and stammer and demand to know more - she can _not_ just drop that comment casually and walk away from it - but she won’t elaborate beyond the bit she teases you with. “You should ask her about it sometime,” she says. “I’m sure she’d love to tell you the story.” 

She draws out the suggestion to such an extent you groan. She’s doing it on purpose, and the last thing you need right now is to have an extended conversation with Jillian Holtzmann. 

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Noelle whispers conspiratorially. “She always orders the same drink for herself, and on Fridays - I don’t know why - she _only_ orders for herself. You didn’t hear it from me, but do with that information as you will.” 

The next day, at ten minutes to noon, you order one iced mocha latte with extra chocolate for Jillian Holtzmann, and one for yourself, because you’re intrigued enough (and entertained enough by Noelle’s reaction to you asking for it) to give it a try despite not being much of a coffee drinker. Before she arrives, you sneak a quick sip of your copycat drink and you marvel at the magnetic mystery woman’s ability to consume this chocolate fountain in a cup on a near-daily basis. It’s delicious, but you imagine it can hardly be considered coffee at this point. Then again, if she does drink all five coffees herself when she leaves, maybe it’s in her best interest to change up the pace on occasion. 

You bounce and you fidget as you check your watch every five seconds, and adjust and readjust your hair as you wait for the gentle chime of bells on the door which will announce her arrival if everything goes according to plan. You have to admit that although you resisted opening yourself to these feelings, your eager nerves and excited antsiness prove a strangely positive sensation overall; you lean into the possibilities they provide. 

Noelle shapes her fingers into a heart and wishes you luck. 

Holtzmann enters the café at her usual time, and Noelle delights in letting her know her drink has already been covered. She points you out at your table in the corner where you’ve logged so much time looking at this woman and listening to her it strikes you as unreal you haven’t actually spoken to her before now. You hold up her coffee with a more enthusiastic wave than you were capable of the day prior.

She climbs into the seat by your side, and her audacious authenticity is infectious in the way sparks and glimmers and shines.

“Come here often?” she says - and it’s not a question. 

It’s an invitation. 

You breathe, an exhale which becomes a smile and a heat in your cheeks and a conversation. 

You breathe, and you drink in the sweetness of sugar and stars. 

You breathe, and somewhere between believing and belonging, you let yourself hope for beginning. 


	3. Chapter 3

You hold your breath as you maintain, for a while, a delicate dance of conversations and compliments and touches which linger on the cusp of something more. Something different. It’s just enough to let her know you’re interested, but just enough that you could walk it back at no cost to your dignity if she doesn’t feel the same, too. 

Days turn into weeks, and you linger, for a while, in a friendship you never define the parameters of. 

You restructure your days around your dates. 

She scans the café and searches for you when she comes in. Every time she sees you right where she expects to find you, she brightens and bounces on her feet, all but racing over to your table to join you. 

Sometimes, she’s waiting there ahead of you. 

Oftentimes, anymore, she buys one drink for you to share, having caught on that you really only consume her mocha-not-a-lattes for her benefit, and you don’t really drink coffee on your own. 

You catch the sparks that spiral out of her in your hands and your hair, and you delight in the way they flicker and flutter between you. She’s just as incredible up-close, and you can match her just fine in your own magic. 

In a transitional space for people at the crossroads of their lives, you dance at the cusp of creation, but neither of you move, yet, toward what exists beyond friendship. 

You step up to the threshold the first time you dare to ask her something strange - as opposed to safe topics like weekends and weather - and she doesn’t step back. You do so primarily, but not solely, because you’re convinced Jillian Holtzmann doesn’t know _how_ to make small talk, a suspicion she confirms with some degree of regularity. As you hold up the first drink you buy for her, you discover a charisma you didn’t know you were capable of when you ask if she’d like to tell you how she saved the city and the world from an army of the undead. She gleefully fills you in on the ins and outs of what it’s like to stop something that shouldn’t exist with science, and it sets the tone for all that follows. 

And so authenticity becomes an unspoken expectation of your conversations from that point forward. 

She steps up to the threshold the first time she touches you, and you don’t step back. You pull out your laptop to show her something you’ve been working on, and she rests her elbow on your shoulder as she leans in close to read over what you’ve written. You lose your vision when your eyes blue-screen out in complete overwhelm of the brush of bare skin against your own, but she doesn’t seem to assign any special significance to what she’s done, or recognize the effect it has on you. The interdisciplinary ribbing that accompanies this action becomes a full-blown, spirited debate over the contributions of the natural sciences versus the social sciences, and she touches you several more times - a resting of her hand over yours here, a leaning into you there - as you playfully goad each other. 

And so casual touching becomes a staple of your interactions from that moment on. 

It’s easy and natural, how much you feel like yourself around her. 

Then, you step beyond the boundary one day without realizing you’ve done so. The shift, when it happens for you, barely registers in the moment. The change is so subtle and soft it sneaks by almost imperceptibly, only to leap into your awareness with an intensity that seizes you around the throat. 

At the end of one of your precious lunch hours, you watch Holtzmann when she goes, just as you watch her every time she goes. But this time, a wistful wisp of longing catches in your throat as she bounces along down the street back into a world you’re not part of - not really, not yet. A summer breeze urges wind-tousled curls over the edge of sunny glasses and you can only imagine she’s wearing a sunny smile to match. You’re still not sure how she stacks five drinks in her arms ( _because cup holders are for dudes_ , you can hear her insist, in that silly sapphic drawl that feels like waterfalls over your ears) and carries them to the firehouse without spilling them, but she’s holding them in a Danger Tower again and you can’t help but snicker. 

Yet, the flutter in your heart falters to something more vulnerable mere moments later, because you’re past the point of no return and you know it. You’ve fallen for her whether she’s given you permission to or not. You’re in too deep and you should back out now, because you’re all but daring the flame to burn you, but you won’t, because her warmth feels too good on your skin. 

It’s hard not to worry you may be more invested than she is. You’ve never discussed what this is or isn’t, despite the fact you’ve discussed everything from ghosts to nuclear lasers of questionable legality. You’re pretty sure ghosts are real, and you’re positive her arsenal of nuclear lasers breaks multiple laws. You’re equally certain she doesn’t care one bit about the latter, and would probably wear it as a badge of pride if she ever got herself put on some kind of government watchlist because of it. 

What you’re far less certain of is how you fit into the future she envisions for herself, if you’re important enough to have a role there at all. And the thought makes you ache. You’ve long ago lost the ability to imagine your life without the tiny tempest who blazed into it and lights it on fire anew with every smile, every story, every stare and every star that falls out of her sky and into your skin. You’re attached whether you’d prefer to be or not, and while you could handle it if she doesn’t reciprocate your feelings for her, you’ll be devastated if the acknowledgment of their existence frightens her, or prompts her to run. 

Maybe you just won’t acknowledge them, you decide. 

You proceed to pick at your nail with idle fingers and sigh, because that choice isn’t fulfilling at all - and neither is staying like this. You turn your attention back to the window, and she’s almost far enough away now that you can’t see her. You watch her fade, holding her in your heart until she disappears into the horizon - gone again, until tomorrow. 

_Don’t you break my heart, Jillian Holtzmann_ , you think to yourself.

You steady yourself with the control you’re still capable of, and you strengthen your courage to cross the threshold into whatever may await you on the other side. 

You breathe, slowly, and you focus on the way your chest rises and falls. 

You breathe, deeply, and you take in the sensations which keep you tethered to the present. 

In the absence of confirmation or denial, there’s really nothing else you can do.


	4. Chapter 4

You hold your breath and wait for the other shoe to drop, even as your days become dominated by the opportunities you invent to inspire her smile, and to revel in the music of her lavender laughter. 

It’s inevitable, you’re convinced, and it’s better if you make your peace with the possibility before you become so attached it hurts to let go when she leaves. You wait for her to lose interest. To be put off and tell you you’ve misinterpreted her affection. To disappear without a word or warning. You prepare for all of it. You psych yourself up for rejection, or worse - the slow fading away of a spark which dims not through any fault of its own, but simply because it was never meant to last within the conditions it ignited. 

You don’t think Holtzmann would ever hurt you intentionally. The woman who vocalizes every thought to flit through her head seems incapable of pretense, if for no other reason than she doesn’t have the patience for it. But just because she won’t mean to hurt you doesn’t mean it will hurt less when she does. So, you watch. And you wait. You let yourself enjoy your time together, sure - but you steel yourself against vulnerability and strengthen your walls with resilience and will. After all, you’ve spent enough of your life reshaping yourself to fit inside impossible boxes. You won’t reshape yourself again for her, should you not be enough for her exactly as you are. 

She doesn’t leave, though. 

She never does. 

She remembers your favorite movie from the one offhand comment you make one time and promptly forget about. You’re touched when she notices it’s playing at the cute historic theatre nearby and invites you to join her to see it. You’re less touched when you realize her plan is to sneak the two of you in - because of course it is, and you don’t know why you would have expected anything else. She shushes you as you sputter and stammer your lack of enthusiasm, but you give in to her incorrigible mischief, anyway. When you get caught, you’re the one who interlaces your fingers with hers and spirits her away down the street while she triumphantly cries out, “Be gay, do crimes!” 

The two of you wind up on the rooftop of her apartment, in the end, where you give the constellations inappropriate names and argue passionately about whose demeanor was suspicious enough to ruin her brilliant plan. You tell her she exudes questionable energy through her perpetual grin and that maniacal light which dances behind her eyes at all times; she retorts that you broke the first rule of being gay and doing crimes by not playing it cool, and anyone could have seen you were up to something from a mile away. She lets her forehead rest against yours while you bicker about irrelevant nonsense for hours, giggling your way through the entire night. When you finally part ways, you realize you haven’t let go of her hand since you pulled her away from the theatre. 

You memorize the names of her “children,” and you learn the detailed backstories she’s made up for each one. You promise not to tell when she confides in you that Marie, with her radioactive namesake and capricious personality to match, is her favorite, and she sneaks her extra treats when the others aren’t looking. Perhaps to emphasize your sworn secrecy - or perhaps just to have an excuse to draw from the seemingly infinite reserve of sunlight in her skin - you rest your hand on top of hers, and smooth your thumb gently over her knuckles. The gesture makes her shiver - a reactive, almost undignified motion. With her free hand, she tugs her glasses back down over her eyes, but she can’t quite mask the way she reddens at the touch. You can’t quite read her reaction, except to the extent that she doesn’t take her hand away. 

She retraces with you the path you took down Christopher Street when you first moved to the Village, but she points out all of the landmarks you didn’t know to look for along the way. She insists on walking arm in arm “like a proper gay knight” and it leaves you a proper gay mess. When she returns you to your apartment, exiting with a wink and a salute, you lie down on the floor the moment she’s out of earshot and groan into your hands until you can fully appreciate how in over your head and out of your mind you are. You cross your arms and pout at the way she so easily picks apart your best-laid plans and intentions to remain unattached. 

You clumsily converse about her line of work, and the unreality of her daily reality causes you to stumble over unfamiliar words and concepts despite your intelligence and multiple degrees. You think you play it off well, but after your third time of mangling the extra-precise category of ghost she’s busted that day - a wonder of multisyllabic compound words which flow so easily and naturally from her own lips - she draws you a diagram on a napkin of the paranormal classification system she and her colleagues use. She grins and quirks her brow and teases you for whatever your attempt at communicating the nuances of her field was. But she leans in close and wraps her arm across your back as she pours over the chart with you, inviting you into her world with warmth and openness. She never judges you for what you don’t know. She sparks and pops and crackles with excitement at the chance to share in something with you. 

You keep the napkin, though you never tell her. From time to time, you trace at the messy, squarish scrawl, and you wonder if somewhere in this feeling you’ve found what it means to come home. 

You breathe, and you discover, suddenly, how it must feel for her to brim over with an effusiveness so intense it has to escape through her fingers. You can’t help the sunlight that spills out of you whenever you think about her - whenever you brush the bit of tissue paper that connects you to her world outside of the café, the world you worried for so long you wouldn’t be important enough to her to be brought into. 

You smile into the series of perfect coincidences which had to occur to bring you together. 

You smile and you breathe, because she’s not how or where you were expecting to find home in all of the Village’s red brick buildings and remnants of revolutions past, but she sure feels like summer and sunflowers and everything you’ve been searching for. 


	5. Chapter 5

You’re not sure when it dawns on you she’s holding her breath, too. 

Maybe it’s the time you ask her about her upbringing, and she shuts down so hard she trembles from a tension which overtakes her body and renders her frozen in place. Through tight lips and a clenched jaw, she affirms that her colleagues - Abby, Patty, Erin, Kevin, and Dr. Gorin, names you’ve come to know well in the time you’ve spent together - are the only family she’s ever known. She finds a reason to excuse herself and rushes out of the café without the remainder of her drink shortly after, so distraught and barely-contained that even Noelle notices, and shoots you a look of concern. You ruminate and worry over brushing a trigger you weren’t aware existed, and your heart aches for the traumas she must have overcome to become the person she is. 

But she’s all smiles and spirit again when she finds her way to your table the next day. 

She doesn’t bring it up again, and you don’t know how to. 

Or maybe it’s the time you bemoan some of the girls you dated in those small towns full of small people which you couldn’t escape fast enough. The ones who were closeted, the ones without ambition or drive, the ones who wearily but too-readily accepted life could never be more than begrudged tolerance and whispers in the dark. Holtzmann listens, but she shifts uncomfortably as she does, and with some gentle prodding, she admits she can’t relate. She’s had a few relationships here and there, but nothing serious, because most women run - or become scared of her - when her eccentric ebullience doesn’t falter with time in the way they expect, or hope. She’s not the girl anyone brings home; she’s always, at best, a fun distraction for a while until they move onto someone less colorful, more palatable, more presentable, less _her_. 

If you think it breaks you how miserable she sounds when she clarifies she’s not joking when she says Abby was her only friend up until a year ago, it shatters you when she chews on her lip and whispers, with a devastating chin tremble, “It’s not an act. It’s who I am.” 

She looks at you pleadingly after the rare glimpse she allows you into the shredded fabric and shards below her surface, a pointed stare which conveys _I’m scared_ and _don’t run_ and _don’t leave_ all at once. Yet, at the same time, her gaze is steeled with resolve, and you recognize the weight of what it leaves unsaid: 

_I won’t reshape myself for you, either, should I not be enough for you exactly as I am._

In response, you breathe, unexpectedly, her name, because the hitch in her voice creates a hiccup in your rhythm you want to rectify, immediately. You’re out of your seat in an instant, crossing the table to sit beside her instead of across from her. Placing your hand between her shoulders, you rub her back and do your best to soothe away some of the anxieties she buries beneath layers of careful detachment. 

“Oh, honey,” you sigh, the pet name slipping from your lips before you can think to be self-conscious over it. “I know it is. I like you just the way you are.” 

Holtzmann squeezes her eyes shut and reaches again for her sunny glasses, ironically, to darken and dampen a world which is so bright it hurts her and she needs to intercept its intensity. She shudders from the ripples of all of the experiences unseen and unknown to you which have prompted her to question herself. You want so badly to scoop her up and show her how you see her, to make her understand how radiant and vibrant and _good_ she is. 

So, you keep talking. Any silence on your end right now would not be of the familiar, comfortable sort, you decide, and you don’t intend to rest until the boldest and brightest force of nature to enter your life in recent memory is thoroughly reassured. 

“I wouldn’t run all over the city or sneak into a movie theatre for someone I didn’t absolutely adore,” you continue, “and I wouldn’t sit here every day to help her finish these giant coffees even though caffeine makes me jittery. There’s no one else in the world like you - ” 

She’s still frowning, but she is listening, as evidenced by the fact that she leans into the comfort you offer and lays her head down on your collar, nuzzling the top of her forehead against your chin. The closeness and the touch of her skin against yours inspire a sudden awareness of the pulse she must certainly feel. You swallow, sweeping self-consciousness aside, and press on. 

“ - but there’s no one else in the world like me, or Noelle, either, and isn’t that why we’re here?” 

You motion across the café full of paint-splattered tables and mismatched coffee mugs, of wanderers and travelers and people on the outskirts of respectable society by intention as often as through no fault of their own. Noelle winks when you catch her attention and curls her fingers in the shape of a heart, holding them up to her open eye with a wide smile. There’s an equal possibility she means, “I see you” as much as there’s one that she’s being her standard silly self without any special significance, and the lack of knowing warms you in its illustration of your point. 

“This is a place where we don’t have to worry about being too much, or not enough,” you conclude. “We can just...breathe. We can just breathe and be exactly who we are, and I hope you always feel like that with me. You, the way you are is…” 

You sputter, but you don’t waver, when every word proves applicable and yet none of them are sufficient, somehow. 

“...everything, to me.” 

Her devastating chin tremble wins out. Her shoulders heave as she gasps out a little sob, though she presses her hands to her mouth to obscure it. You’re not sure, right away, if this is a positive noise or a negative one - until she wraps both of her arms around your neck and buries her face against you. Blood rushes to your ears as the weight of your words has the opportunity to settle in your shoulders; your heart is definitely thudding now, and you’ve shot any notion of keeping your racing pulse a secret from her. 

You wonder if anyone has ever said that to her before. 

And you aren’t sure what to do now that you have. 

Time stands suspended in the moment you share with her, but for once, the idleness of it doesn’t fill you with dread. You hold her and you hold your breath and you let her set the pace for how you move forward from here, because you don’t know what else you can do. You sit with her as her own breath comes hard and heavy, then evens out as it gives way to something gentler. You stand steadfast beside her through the difficult moment she needs to have, until it drifts into something easier. 

“Can we go somewhere?” she asks, abruptly interrupting your ability to get too lost in your own mind. “On a walk? I - I think I need some air.” 

“Of course,” you reply. 

You leave the café, and you start off in a direction with no destination in mind. What’s behind you and what’s ahead of you all seem equally irrelevant; all that matters is the space you’re sharing in the present with her. The world around you quiets for the first time since you moved to the city, and you feel perfectly fulfilled, right where you are.

“How are you feeling?” you ask, after it seems like she’s calmed enough to be receptive to the query. 

She lifts her glasses to wipe her eyes, and you don’t comment on it, except to snuggle in close to her as much as your stride allows for. “I feel better. Less, uh, overwhelmed. It was getting stuffy in there.” 

“I’m glad,” you say. “I don’t like when my girlfriend is all sad and stressed.” 

Unlike the pet name in the coffee shop, the word as it leaves your lips this time is intentional. 

Holtzmann stops walking. She turns to face you and fixes her gaze on you, studying you as if to process that she’s heard you correctly. 

“Girlfriends,” she repeats. She beams as she rolls the concept around on her tongue, huffing out a little chuckle of pleased disbelief. Her voice notches up a level or two as she follows up with a question she seems to already know the answer to. “Is that what we are?” 

“It can be,” you respond evenly, “if you want to be.” 

She rolls with your lighthearted energy, raising both of her fists in a signal of victory. “Yesss!” she cheers, and she winks at you as she lowers her arms. “Because I definitely thought we were girlfriends already.” 

“We have been, as far as I’m concerned,” you agree, “at least from the time you convinced me to be gay and do crimes with you.” 

“The night is still young,” she offers, with a waggle of her brows. She moves to tickle you for emphasis, and you playfully push her away. 

“No!” you cry. “Once was enough. I wasn’t even good at it.” 

She snickers at you, but you both settle into stillness, content to linger in the peace of the moment you’ve arrived at. Several long minutes pass before either of you feels the need to speak again - until a sharp crack splits the air and you can feel something is weighing on her again. 

“I want to say something,” she announces suddenly. 

You assure her she can tell you anything, and you wait patiently while she summons the courage to continue. When she does speak, the words run into each other within the single breath she allows herself to voice them, but you’ve spent just enough time with her to be able to decipher them: 

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’d really like to kiss you right now if that’s okay,” she says. 

Jillian Holtzmann always has been good at stealing the air from your lungs. 

But it doesn’t escape your attention she’s fading right as you’re starting to glow. 

The time it takes you to compose yourself must go on for just a bit too long, you muse, because she fidgets, clenching and unclenching her hands like she doesn’t have an outlet for the excess electric current rolling through her. And like an overstimulated teapot, she blows a long breath upward towards an errant curl which has escaped its containment. 

It’s a distraction. 

Something to do other than look at you. 

Her eyes turn toward the sky and away from exposure - from the mortifying ordeal of being seen and known at her softest and least dauntless, at her rawest and most defenseless. 

“Holtz,” you say, and you reach out to cradle her face between your hands. “Look at me.” 

She does. She shakes, but she holds your gaze, and you recognize what the gesture takes for the woman who stirs and shifts and relent lessly moves to soothe her ceaseless discomfort in a world which has never once held her in her magic and celebrated it. Never once cherished her in her audacious authenticity for all the ways it sparks and glimmers and shines and washes you in glitter. Only ever scraped away at the sweetness of her soul because she’s too loud and too strange and too queer and too _much_ \- she’s too much and it’s never enough - and she’s started to believe it herself. 

“It’s okay,” you whisper, smoothing the pads of your fingers over soft skin and golden curls. 

It’s okay. 

You’re nervous, too. 

But you’ve got her, and you show her with every stroke of your hand against her cheek, unhurried and undemanding and yet uninhibited, too. She’s safe with you, if she wants to be. Your touch is a promise whispered to the wind that you’ll soothe the storms in her heart and quiet the chaos in her mind - that you’ll remind her she’s everything when she feels like she’s nothing. You can be indescribable together, if she lets you. You can chase creation side by side, and be reborn again and again as the people you’ll become in each other’s influence, if she leans in to meet you. 

A reassuring warmth illuminates your smile and she returns it, bringing her hands up to cover your own. Her eyes flutter shut as the tension in her muscles melts away. She pauses, and her shy smile creeps upward toward her ears until it becomes a wide grin; you delight in the gentle rose color that fills in the space around her scrunched nose. A hint of blue reappears when she takes one of your hands and turns it over, contemplative. 

And her defenses drop, just a little more, just enough to let you inside the guarded heart she’s carried all alone for so long, for too long - which you vow in this moment you’ll never let her carry alone again. 

She kisses your palm, hesitantly, and when you let out a soft sound somewhere between a sigh and a laugh, she kisses your cheek a little less hesitantly. Emboldened, then, she kisses your dimple and your nose with complete confidence, but she falters at your lips. She licks her own. Nervous. She’s standing so close you can feel the rise and fall of her breath against your skin. 

Her gaze flicks back up to yours, asking for the consent she seems worried you’re going to take back. You wonder how many people in the world have ever seen her so vulnerable, stripped of all the protective layers she places between herself and those who would commit to misunderstanding her. And while you want to give her the space to take her time, to be unsure, to breathe in the beauty of fluidity - of unpressured, undulating moments in the ongoing story of an ocean - you also don’t want her to be _scared_. 

So, you bridge the teensy gap between you and brush her lips with your own - a soft caress, so as not to overwhelm her. You linger just long enough to savor the spark of sugar in her skin; you’ve been stealing her lattes for long enough to recognize the taste. She steps forward as you step back, and your second kiss lasts a bit longer - long enough, this time, for her to slide her hand into your hair, and for you to loop your arms around her waist. 

You hold her. 

You breathe.

You breathe, because you’ve found home in the place by her side. 

You breathe, because in her embrace, you see all the ways you touch tranquility and transcend truth, together. 

You breathe, because you know that in her arms, you’ll never have to hold your breath again. 

You’ll hold _her_ , instead. 

And you’ll breathe. 


End file.
